Gold Diggers of Broadway
1929 film by Roy Del Ruth
Gold Diggers of Broadway (also known as The Gold Diggers of Broadway) is a 1929 American sound (All-Talking) pre-Code musical comedy film directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Winnie Lightner and Nick Lucas. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, the film is the second all-talking, all-Technicolor feature-length film (after On with the Show!, also released that year by Warner Bros).
Gold Diggers of Broadway became a box office sensation, making Winnie Lightner a worldwide star and boosting guitarist crooner Nick Lucas to further fame as he sang two songs that became 20th-century standards: "Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips with Me" and "Painting the Clouds with Sunshine".
Based on the 1919 play The Gold Diggers—which was also turned into a silent film of the same name in 1923—Gold Diggers of Broadway used showgirls, Technicolor, and sound as its main selling points.
It was released in New York City on August 29, 1929, and was played at the Winter Garden Theatre.
It was chosen as one of the ten best films of 1929 by The Film Daily. As with many early Technicolor films, no complete print survives, although the last twenty minutes do, but missing are a bridging sequence and the last minute of the film. Contemporary reviews, the soundtrack and the surviving footage suggest that the film was a fast-moving comedy which was enhanced by Technicolor and a set of lively and popular songs. It encapsulates the spirit of the flapper era, giving a glimpse of a world about to be changed by the Great Depression.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gold Diggers of Broadway” is 1929 film by Roy Del Ruth. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gold, Diggers and Broadway, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3110003. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1919 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gold Diggers of Broadway” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.